Bridged
by Bekas Strife
Summary: Hope Estheim is a Ranger who swore he would never let another someone into his head when traumatic events strip him of his mother. Noel is the sole survivor of a Kaiju attack who strives to be someone his family would be proud of. / [Snippets of their lives as they intertwine and then become one and the same.] / [NoeHopu][Snerah] / two-shot.


_**DISCLAIMER: I do not own the FFXIII series, Pacific Rim or any of the characters. **_

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_Saw Pacific Rim, loved the movie and had the insane idea of throwing my OTP into the middle of it. _  
_It strays from the movie's original plot but the concepts are the same._

**Happy reading!  
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**i.**  
The very first time Hope sees a Jaeger up close it's in Oblivion Bay, where his father had been stationed to further analyze the battered robots in search for any that might have a chance at reconstruction. There was one, his father told him and pointed him towards it.  
It was _massive_. It exuded power. It was _humbling_.  
As his mother squeezed his shoulder, he felt something ignite within his chest at the same time the Jaeger's core flared to life and cheers were heard across the graveyard.  
He would become a Jaeger pilot.

**ii.**  
The very first time Noel sees a Jaeger up close is in the middle of the rubble of what used to be his village, located close to the sea so they could take advantage of the fish and hunt less, therefore lessening the possibilities of losing one of their hunters. Sobs shake his small frame and it's hard to see with the tears in his eyes but as he clutches his small sandal to his chest, he sees the massive robot stand tall in front of the monster that had just killed and destroyed everything he knew. As a pink haired pilot emerged from the Jaeger's shoulder and smiled down reassuringly at him, he felt relief run through his body.  
He wasn't alone. He was _safe_.  
As he looked around one last time before being led away by the pilot - who had introduced herself as Lightning and asked him if he wanted to come with her, to which he nodded eagerly - Noel bit his quivering lip and made a silent promise to avenge what he had lost.  
He would become a Jaeger pilot.

**iii.**  
Hope was a young prodigy, people told him.  
He had barely reached his fifteenth birthday when he graduated at the top of his class at the Jaeger Academy and officially became a Ranger, a feat never accomplished before.  
The problems came after.  
Due to his mistrust of others and his introverted personality, none of the candidates recommended proved to be drift compatible with him and without two pilots, a Jaeger wouldn't be going anywhere.  
After three months of trials, Hope was getting _desperate_. Without a co-pilot, his dream would be nothing but that - a dream - and even though he had already been offered several positions in any of the engineering teams tending to and creating other Jaeger, it wasn't what he _wanted_: he wanted to be _out there_, fighting and protecting those dear to him, not sit behind a desk running calculations and creating blueprints.  
As the deadline rushed in and he still found no suitable co-pilot, Hope was about to give up when his own _mother_ walked into the Combat Room and grabbed a _Kendo_ stick, assuming a fighting stance.  
He had asked her if she was sure. Her answer had been a sharp stab to his heart with the end of her weapon. She was determined and wouldn't take no for an answer.  
In the end, he had found his co-pilot.

**iv.**  
Noel was too young, people told him.  
Since he had been rescued by the now Marshall Farron, his adoptive mother, he was insistent in his intent to join the Rangers and become a pilot. He was being forced to wait, however.  
There was a minimum age limit to be able to enter the Rangers - thirteen years old. He was barely ten.  
He often heard Aunt Serah complain that it was an age too young to introduce _children_ to the horrors of fighting Kaiju but Lightning always argued back that it was a time of war: young or not, they could _not_ afford to turn back from any help offered to them.  
Aunt Serah usually fell silent after that.  
While he waited, he would have to attend school, per Lightning's desire.  
He had scoffed once she had turned her back on him.  
As if algebra or History lessons would prepare him for his goal: they _hadn't_ prepared humans for the first Kaiju attack that had singlehandedly destroyed three whole cities until they were able to stop it and they most certainly _wouldn't_ prepare him. Still, he did what was asked of him and he gave it his very best. It was the least he could do at the moment to honor all of what his mentor had done so far for him... but he wouldn't give up.  
He would become a Jaeger pilot and make Lightning and his family proud.

**v.**  
Sharing a neural handshake could be explained as an act of _intimacy_: every little thing you have ever gone through is exposed to your co-pilot and in turn, the same happens to them.  
Your two minds become one. There are no secrets. Only pure and complete understanding of each other.  
To share that experience with your mother... There is not much she doesn't know about you in the first place (especially when you're young) but there's a world of information _you_ just don't know about your parents. He had only ever known _Mom_. Then he got to know _Nora.  
_He now knew it all: from her very first memories with the grandparents he had never got to meet to his conception - he could barely look her in the eye when they disconnected, _gods_ - and consequent birth followed by her feelings on him becoming a pilot and her decision to join him.  
How _proud_ she was of _him_.  
Hope had always been close to his mother: of all the people he wanted to keep close and protected, she was at the top of that list; he loved her the most.  
When Nora became his co-pilot, he had been relieved because then he had the _best chance_ at keeping her _safe_ - all he had to was what he was _best_ at: pilot and fight in a Jaeger.  
Plus, Jaeger were tough. _Sturdy_. Made to withstand and retaliate to Kaiju attacks.  
Was there any better place to keep her protected?  
Then a category III Kaiju emerged and he lost his _naivety_.  
They had willingly lost their advantage to move a small fishing boat out of harm's way and allowed the Kaiju to notice them and attack first, which had been their first mistake. Still, they defeated it... or so they thought. Preparing to leave as the Command Center pronounced the Kaiju dead, they let their guard down. It was their second mistake.  
Second and last.  
The right side of the con-pod was ripped off and in seconds, his world crashed into tiny shards, falling around him as a scream tore out of his throat.  
When he woke up at the medical center, he was told that he had finished killing the Kaiju and dragged the damaged Jaeger back to shore, all while surviving the neural load of the single connection.  
He doesn't answer.  
All he remembers is pain, screams and the feeling of his mother's chest caving in, her heart stuttering before coming to a stop and then the emptiness of a suddenly lost neural connection.  
All the rest is white noise.

**vi.**  
Noel's in the middle of solving a stupidly complicated mathematical equation in the shatterdome's conference room when the Kaiju alert goes off.  
As always, his heart jumps in his throat and a multitude of questions run through his head, hanging heavy on the tip of his tongue:  
Where was it?  
What category was it?  
Who was being deployed to deal with it?  
He remains in his seat, however. He knows better than to try and pry for information when a Kaiju was attacking.  
It's not long before Lightning suddenly bursts into the conference room and leads him away, leaving Noel dumbfounded at the quantity of people that move past him and start taking seats. Of all the years he spent moving from shatterdome to shatterdome with his adoptive mother, he had never heard of all the higher-ups assembling right after an attack. Sure, they would get together and discuss damages and further defensive measures - if what his Aunt Serah told him was the truth - but usually it was _days_ _after an attack_, when all the damage was assessed.  
Why were they assembling when the alarm had _just_ gone off?  
... Had they_ lost_?  
He thinks of asking but when he looks up, Lightning's face is impassive and there's hurt in her eyes: it's a look he had never seen in her face before and that squeezes his chest tight. He settles for squeezing her hand and letting her go without a complaint when he is safe beside Aunt Serah at the hangar.  
Looking up at the where he knew was the Command Room, he sees Snow - Uncle, as the man insisted in being called; Noel just finds him so extremely obnoxious it's not even _funny_ - pacing back and forth through the glass, head in his hands.  
What had happened?

**vii.**  
His father visits him.  
They sit in silence at first.  
They were never very close; his father was always so absorbed in his work that he was barely home and when he indeed was, his mother was the bridge between them.  
With her gone, they don't know how to communicate.  
Bartholomew tries, though. Tells him it was not his fault. That he was brave. That Nora was sure to have been proud of who he was in her final moments.  
Hope laughs. It's a scary sound.  
He tells his father that his mother's last moments had been of pure _terror_ and that she had kept screaming his name while chanting through their connection that she did _not want to die_.  
That her death had been gruesome as she had been squeezed like a grape by the Kaiju and that in no way it had been the glorified event they kept feeding everyone, of how she had gone out a brave Ranger.  
She had been _terrified_.  
She had _regretted_ her decision to pilot with him.  
She had wanted to _live_.  
After that, Bartholomew doesn't try again.

**viii.**  
They had lost a Jaeger and it's pilots, the Estheim duo.  
The Kaiju were evolving and the Jaeger were falling quicker than they could fix them.  
Lightning was doing her best - he had barely seen her in months - but according to hushed voices around the shatterdome, the Jaeger program was losing supporters.  
Noel squeezed his hands into fists as stood in the hangar, shifting uneasily as he looked over the remaining robots.  
He was young but he was not _stupid_.  
There were less people working on them. The engineering teams were smaller too. Faces he was used to seeing almost every day at the Command Center suddenly weren't there anymore.  
The program had lost funding and it was on it's last leg.  
Swallowing hard, Noel bit his lip to keep it from shaking.  
Would his chance at being a pilot be gone before he was even old enough to take it?

**ix.**  
They deemed him fit to return to his duties as a Ranger soon after his father's visit.  
They also proposed extensive therapy and regular check-ups to ascertain the extent of the damage caused by the abrupt end of the neural connection between him as his mother.  
He refused both and moved to another shatterdome as soon as he could, requesting only for his identity as a previous pilot not to be revealed.  
He had had _enough_.  
As he set foot inside his new working place, Hope made a promise to himself as he stared up at the robots seemingly staring down at him through empty visages.  
He would never set foot inside a Jaeger again.

**x.**  
The Jaeger program was pronounced dead.  
His heart had shattered when the news reached him but as he looked up at Lightning in search for solace, he felt her gentle hand on his head, ruffling his hair.  
_They were the resistance now_, she announced. Crouching down before him, she held his eyes.  
He was going to become a Jaeger pilot, regardless of age.


End file.
